A page of technical phrases for snare drum, in 7/8 time, after Ron Fink’s book of the same name. One thing I admire in anything technical is good structure— I talk about it, meanderingly, in […]
Category: exercises
Reed tweak: endurance exercise for improving singles
This is a real straightforward exercise for improving short single stroke fills, using unisons. Based on a normal interpretation used with Syncopation, by Ted Reed— playing the book rhythm as accents on the cymbals (with […]
Stick Control in triplets redux
Rewriting something from 2012, that is really unreadable: the first page of Stick Control in triplets, in two voices. I was really unkind in the early years of this site, really jamming a lot of […]
Level system warm ups
Here’s a collection of brief exercises working out some basic combinations of strokes— full strokes, down strokes, taps, and up strokes. Called the Level System by some, it refers to how high the stick is […]
Paradiddles with Bellson
Throwing a bone to fans of Louis Bellson’s Modern Reading Text in 4/4 here, with an easy paradiddle system. Most of these things happen naturally out of my teaching, or my playing; here I just […]
Pataflafla builder
Exceptionally granular page of exercises developing the pataflafla, a drag variant, and Steve Gadd’s pataflafla-ed 6 stroke roll— you can hear that in his solo on the Tom Scott record here. Usually I would walk […]
Beginning open drags and rolls
UPDATE: I’ve rewritten this page in standard roll/drag notation— in 16th notes in 2/4. You can use the page here as a key if there’s any question of how to interpret it. Basic page of […]
Ultimate double paradiddle builder – 01
Happy 2026 everyone— continuing this “ultimate builder” series, with double paradiddles. It looks like a lot of stuff, but these are all things you have to have together to do the actual rudiment. You’ll learn […]
Fun with 9s and 11s
Hey, get out of here! This isn’t for you. Go wan, git! Scoot! …good. And now, everybody left over, thinking all the lightweights have been scared off… you get out too. This is for nobody, […]
Jazz patterns for massive repetition
For a younger student of mine. Right now he has a notebook of stuff like the baghad vita, sometimes you need to pare it down for them. This is a small collection of jazz patterns […]
Left-leading density patterns – 01
Continuing this page of left handed rudimental/rudiment-like exercise patterns, getting into some very dense activity, forcing some speedy movement. See this post for the justification for getting into the odd tuplets at all— it’s not […]